Distributed Information and Computation in Generic Quantum Systems

hello greetings it is january 29th 2026 and we're in active inference guest stream 126.1 with chris fields james glazebrook and maurice defree so thank you all fellows for joining first chris is going to talk a little bit about the new book and then we'll have a discussion so if you're watching live you can write any questions in the live chat thank you chris to you uh thank you daniel um thanks for this opportunity for doing a brief presentation on this new book by jim glazebrook and myself on distributed information and computation in generic quantum systems this was published by springer last november i believe or december so is available online and what i wanted to start today by doing was just give a little motivation of what we're doing in this book um so that you can see once we get into it uh why we're we've assembled the topics that we've actually assembled so there are three main ideas here um the first is that quantum theory is not a very complicated theory about um the motions of small particles although that's how it's typically presented and it can certainly be used uh to describe um motions of electrons and atoms for example that's what it was developed to do from experimental motivations but in the last few decades it's been recognized that quantum theory is actually an information theory and so we're starting from the point of view that quantum theory is actually a theory of information exchange which means it's a theory of how systems prepare states and then measure those states and we'll see that running throughout the second main idea is that the free energy principle which many of you will be familiar with some maybe not which was developed 20 years ago as an idea in theoretical neuroscience uh our second idea is that the free energy principle is actually a practical criterion for deciding whether any bounded quantum system is persistent in time and again this is not a new idea to us in fact carl friston the originator of the free energy principle published this perspective and applied the free energy principle to essentially generic systems already in 2019 and the literature of the free energy principle since that time has been increasingly focused on the free energy principle as a foundation a foundational principle of persistence in physics and then the third basic idea is that active inference is a natural description of quantum computation active inference is the the picture of behavior that one obtains from the free energy principle active inference is a combination of learning and acting on the environment so as to change its properties its observable properties and if you think about an organism or a robot that can act on its environment then one of the primary kinds of actions it can take is just to move around to go somewhere else so if i don't like what my environment is doing to me here i can go to a different place and my environment in that different place may be different so by going on vacation for example i can alter how my environment is behaving to me so this is a very kind of um also fairly standard idea uh the term active inference was not introduced until about 2010 and by i think carl frisden again um but thinking of this as a way of describing quantum computation is somewhat new at least it um our motivation here is that any internal dynamics of a generic system can be described in this way as a combination of learning and action uh now clearly this rules out some things for example the idea of of a system that passively observes its environment is actually not formulaable within this theory it's an idea that doesn't make any sense uh because actions are are always symmetrical across boundaries as we'll see uh later on so a lot actually follows from these simple sorts of ideas uh some of which is in the book and of course it motivates our more recent work and some of this same thinking of course motivates the work of lots of other people besides us in the physics community and the…